The Hidden Oracle (The Trials of Apollo #1)(5)

Whatever was left of my pride turned to ice water and trickled into my socks. “I walked right into that, didn’t I?”

“Yep!” Meg bounced up and down in her red sneakers. “We’re going to have fun!”

With great difficulty, I resisted the urge to weep. “Are you sure you’re not Artemis in disguise?”

“I’m that other thing,” Meg said, counting my money. “The thing you said before. A demigod.”

“How do you know?”

“Just do.” She gave me a smug smile. “And now I have a sidekick god named Lester!”

I raised my face to the heavens. “Please, Father, I get the point. Please, I can’t do this!”

Zeus did not answer. He was probably too busy recording my humiliation to share on Snapchat.

“Cheer up,” Meg told me. “Who’s that guy you wanted to see—the guy on the Upper East Side?”

“Another demigod,” I said. “He knows the way to a camp where I might find shelter, guidance, food—”

“Food?” Meg’s ears perked up almost as much as the points on her glasses. “Good food?”

“Well, normally I just eat ambrosia, but, yes, I suppose.”

“Then that’s my first order! We’re going to find this guy to take us to the camp place!”

I sighed miserably. It was going to be a very long servitude.

“As you wish,” I said. “Let’s find Percy Jackson.”





Used to be goddy

Now uptown feeling shoddy

Bah, haiku don’t rhyme

AS WE TRUDGED up Madison Avenue, my mind swirled with questions: Why hadn’t Zeus given me a winter coat? Why did Percy Jackson live so far uptown? Why did pedestrians keep staring at me?

I wondered if my divine radiance was starting to return. Perhaps the New Yorkers were awed by my obvious power and unearthly good looks.

Meg McCaffrey set me straight.

“You smell,” she said. “You look like you’ve just been mugged.”

“I have just been mugged. Also enslaved by a small child.”

“It’s not slavery.” She chewed off a piece of her thumb cuticle and spit it out. “It’s more like mutual cooperation.”

“Mutual in the sense that you give orders and I am forced to cooperate?”

“Yep.” She stopped in front of a storefront window. “See? You look gross.”

My reflection stared back at me, except it was not my reflection. It couldn’t be. The face was the same as on Lester Papadopoulos’s ID.

I looked about sixteen. My medium-length hair was dark and curly—a style I had rocked in Athenian times, and again in the 1970s. My eyes were blue. My face was pleasing enough in a dorkish way, but it was marred by a swollen eggplant-colored nose, which had dripped a gruesome mustache of blood down my upper lip. Even worse, my cheeks were covered with some sort of rash that looked suspiciously like…My heart climbed into my throat.

“Horrors!” I cried. “Is that—Is that acne?”

Immortal gods do not get acne. It is one of our inalienable rights. Yet I leaned closer to the glass and saw that my skin was indeed a scarred landscape of whiteheads and pustules.

I balled my fists and wailed to the cruel sky, “Zeus, what have I done to deserve this?”

Meg tugged at my sleeve. “You’re going to get yourself arrested.”

“What does it matter? I have been made a teenager, and not even one with perfect skin! I bet I don’t even have…” With a cold sense of dread, I lifted my shirt. My midriff was covered with a floral pattern of bruises from my fall into the Dumpster and my subsequent kicking. But even worse, I had flab.

“Oh, no, no, no.” I staggered around the sidewalk, hoping the flab would not follow me. “Where are my eight-pack abs? I always have eight-pack abs. I never have love handles. Never in four thousand years!”

Meg made another snorting laugh. “Sheesh, crybaby, you’re fine.”

“I’m fat!”

“You’re average. Average people don’t have eight-pack abs. C’mon.”

I wanted to protest that I was not average nor a person, but with growing despair, I realized the term now fit me perfectly.

On the other side of the storefront window, a security guard’s face loomed, scowling at me. I allowed Meg to pull me farther down the street.

She skipped along, occasionally stopping to pick up a coin or swing herself around a streetlamp. The child seemed unfazed by the cold weather, the dangerous journey ahead, and the fact that I was suffering from acne.

“How are you so calm?” I demanded. “You are a demigod, walking with a god, on your way to a camp to meet others of your kind. Doesn’t any of that surprise you?”

“Eh.” She folded one of my twenty-dollar bills into a paper airplane. “I’ve seen a bunch of weird stuff.”

I was tempted to ask what could be weirder than the morning we had just had. I decided I might not be able to stand the stress of knowing. “Where are you from?”

“I told you. The alley.”

“No, but…your parents? Family? Friends?”

A ripple of discomfort passed over her face. She returned her attention to her twenty-dollar airplane. “Not important.”